Network-based communications between computers are increasing in speed. Advances in network speeds, however, have not been fully utilized due to latency that may be associated with processing protocol stacks at computers. Receive side scaling (RSS) is a feature in operating systems that allows network interface devices that support RSS to direct packets of certain Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) flows to be processed on a designated Central Processing Unit (CPU). The RSS feature scales the received traffic across multiple processors in order to avoid limiting the receive bandwidth to the processing capabilities of a single processor.
Note that use of the same reference numbers in different figures indicates the same or like elements.